Category: Drawing

In this photograph, probably taken around 1901, my great aunt, Eliza Elland Bell, by now Eliza Mitchell, is in her mid-thirties.

Born at Blaco Hill Farm Cottages in 1867, by the time she was 13 Eliza had started work as a domestic servant for the Johnsons at a Elm House Farm, Lound.

Ten years later and still working as a domestic servant she’d moved to Miss Hurt’s in Sutton-cum-Lound, and it was there that she met her future husband, the butler, William Henry Mitchell.

Costume

I’m colouring these images in Affinity Photo and Adobe Photoshop. Would a light sky blue be a likely colour for her outfit? I asked my friend Hilary Stubbs, my go-to costume expert:

‘I think that this colour is perfectly possible,’ she tells me, ‘though pale green or lilac would work too. Not pink as it would be considered a”young” colour I do like this colour though and it looks right.

‘The overall look of the garment should look like a dress though in reality it was probably have been a two piece to help with fit and laundering.The skirt often hook and eyed on the waist to prevent gapping.’

This wedding photograph (see link below) was taken just a year or two earlier in 1899 to me has a more Victorian look to it. The 1901 (if that’s when it was taken) with its layers and small jacket looks more Edwardian.

Link

Great Aunt Eliza

Ice Age glaciers and longshore drift have contributed a variety of pebbles to the beach at the northern, landward, end of the spit at Spurn which stretches almost three miles out across the mouth of the Humber Estuary.

Despite previous attempts to protect the spit, high tides now wash over it in places.

Marram grass, Ammophila arenia, stabalises the shifting sands of the dunes.

I was surprised to see a single patch of bluebells, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, growing amongst the marram to the west of the track not far from the area known at The Warren.

Washed up on the beach, a velvet swimming crab, Necora puber, with blue markings on its pincers, legs and shell.

Hornwrack, Flustra foliacea, not a seaweed but a colonial animal. Individual ‘sea moss’ filter-feeding animals called zooids lived in tiny cells that you can see as the stippled surface texture of the fronds.